The image below is the culmination of quite a bit of work determining what the various biomes will look like. A biome is not the same thing as a planetary archetype, but rather one brush of one to many that can be used on a planet. You could have trees meeting up with desert, and some ocean/jungle off in the distance.

Comments

I just hope they don't rush anything. It's promising and looks great thus far.
I just hope they get everything they wanted to implement, perfected and polished before release - regardless of earlier set release dates.

@Edd Pintscher That would be cool. That would also open new paths for other units which could be computationally expensive. But this is the future. If we can't have destructible terrain in RTSs by now, we might as well go back to the 90s.

Looks great. I have a suggestion though. When I was looking at the way the trees are modelled, I thought...Wouldn't it be soo cool if the pathfinding for the largest units (i.e. walkers etc) ignored the usual prescribed routes and just ploughed through the trees. Like the way tanks do in real life. It would add atmosphere and look soo cool. The trees bending out of the way and super units appearing through the tree line. Just an idea.

I have one criticism... Perhaps it should be possible for individual planets to have variations within themselves. Most games all seem to assume that planets only have one theme, but if you look at our earth, there are the icecaps, deserts, canyons, forests all in one. I understand these planets are smaller, and themes are pretty cool, but make a few tile-sets to combine environments would be nice, and season variations/other variations depending on the planets temperature/orientation to its sun would be epic.

OMG, this looks amazing. The metal one however.... its... wow. Also, just a question, is there going to be any chance that we can strap a couple of thrusters to that planet and make it a mobile base? XD

My level of anticipation for this game is off the charts. These images only serve to ratchet up that anticipation. As Chris Norman said, the topless wives are fantastic. Wait ... I meant the spirals. The spirals!

I'm glad you aren't following the Star Trek/ every other scifi setting standard of one environment per planet. It's not that big a deal for some planets are dominated by one environment, especially frozen or volcanic, but it gets annoying when every planet does.